In early September, a federal appeals court told the people of Jackson, Mississippi, that the United States Constitution does not give them a right to drinking water free of lead. For anyone in this basin who turns on a tap and trusts what comes out, that is a sobering thing to read. Here is the part worth holding onto: Pennsylvania’s own constitution says something very different, and it has for more than fifty years.
The full Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting en banc, upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit by Jackson residents who said the city knowingly let them drink lead-tainted water and misled them about it. The court ruled that there is no deeply rooted federal constitutional right to clean water, or to truthful information from officials during a public health crisis. That ruling is about the federal Constitution. It does not repeal the Safe Drinking Water Act, and it does not touch the environmental right written into Pennsylvania’s own constitution. Article I, Section 27 of the Pennsylvania Constitution still guarantees the people a right to pure water and makes the Commonwealth the trustee of our natural resources. The open question is whether we use it.
What the court actually decided
The case is Sterling v. City of Jackson. It grew out of years of trouble with Jackson’s water, including lead levels that state health officials flagged in 2015, and it was filed in 2022. The residents argued that the city violated their constitutional right to bodily integrity by letting them drink contaminated water, hiding how bad it was, and in some stretches making it worse by urging people to boil water, which kills bacteria but can concentrate lead. The en banc Fifth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of those claims. Its reasoning, in plain terms, is that federal courts rarely recognize brand new constitutional rights, and that these harms, however serious, do not fit a right the Constitution already protects. The court also said there is no constitutional right to truthful information from officials during a crisis.
Be clear about what this ruling is and is not. It is a decision about the federal Constitution, and specifically about whether courts will read an affirmative right to safe water into the Fourteenth Amendment. It is not a ruling that lead in the water is acceptable, and it does not erase the federal and state statutes that regulate drinking water. What it does is close one courthouse door, and remind everyone that a right nobody has written down is a right that is very hard to enforce.
“These deprivations, while grievous, do not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.”
Judge Kurt Engelhardt, writing for the en banc Fifth Circuit in Sterling v. City of JacksonWhat Pennsylvania wrote down
Pennsylvania is one of a handful of states that did write it down. In 1971, voters added the Environmental Rights Amendment to the state constitution’s Bill of Rights, as Article I, Section 27. For decades courts treated it as mostly symbolic. That changed in 2017, when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, in a case brought by the Pennsylvania Environmental Defense Foundation, ruled that the amendment has real, independent legal force and that the Commonwealth has to act as a genuine trustee of the state’s public natural resources, for people living now and for generations not yet born.
It is a stronger starting point than the Jackson residents had, but it is not a magic wand. The amendment chiefly constrains government action and binds the Commonwealth as trustee; it is not a guarantee that no pipe will ever carry lead, and on its own it does not regulate every private polluter. What it does give Pennsylvanians is a constitutional footing that the federal courts just told Mississippians they do not have: a written right to pure water that a court here is bound to take seriously.
Why it matters for the rest of us
A right on paper is only as strong as the people willing to stand on it. That is not an abstract point this fall. In the same stretch of days as the Jackson ruling, the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Army advanced a supplemental rule that would narrow which waters the Clean Water Act covers, a change the agencies describe as bringing clarity in line with the Supreme Court’s 2023 Sackett decision, and that conservation groups say would strip federal protection from many streams and wetlands. Reasonable people can argue about that rule. The practical reality for us is simpler: as federal protections get narrower and federal courts get less willing to recognize water rights, the protections written into Pennsylvania’s own constitution matter more, not less. Clean water is not a partisan want; it polls across every line there is. The question Pennsylvania has to answer is the one our own constitution hands us. We have the right. Are we willing to show up, cite it, and demand that the Commonwealth honor it?
Based on the en banc opinion in Sterling v. City of Jackson, Mississippi (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, September 2026), as reported by Mother Jones, Reason, and WLBT. Pennsylvania’s environmental right is Article I, Section 27 of the state constitution, given independent legal effect in Pennsylvania Environmental Defense Foundation v. Commonwealth (2017). The federal rule referenced is the EPA and Army supplemental Waters of the United States proposal. Current as of October 22, 2026.
